The HURD was meant to be the true kernel at the heart of the GNU operating system. The promise behind the HURD was revolutionary -- a set of daemons on top of a microkernel that was intended to surpass the performance of the monolithic kernels of traditional Unix systems and in doing so, give greater security, freedom and flexibility to the users -- but it has yet to come down to earth.

Reason Linux lives is that you can found big companies around Linux and become a multi billionaire. It is not possible to do with FreeBSD or OpenSolaris. Someone owns them.

But with Linux, no one owns the distros. If Linus T would release an official distro, then RedHat and SuSE would die. Everyone would only use Linus distro. Linus could make changes that only benefitted his distros and fought RedHat. You can not run a business on a non Linus distro. Large IT-companies would quickly loose interest in RedHat and SuSE and Ubuntu, etc.

Linux allows you to become rich. It is like gold rush, no one owns the gold. Just grab and sell whatever you can. No one will stop you. It is excellent business idea: someone else develops and does all the hard work, you just bundle and sell it. Easy peasy. Get rich. Anybody can do it. Linux is not owned by someone (FreeBSD and OpenSolaris is owned).

If you try to found a large company around FreeBSD, then you will have problems. Someone else owns it. You would be at the mercy of Sun or Oracle if you tried to capitalize on OpenSolaris. Maybe even enemies.

Look at Blizzard and StarCraft 1. In Korea it is a huge e-sport. The top stars earns millions of USD. Kespa, the Korean E-sport organisation owns and controls everything related to SC1. Broadcasted TV matches, etc. Now, SC2 is arriving. Blizzard wants a piece of the cake, and Kespa has no longer monopoly. Blizzard has cut the contract with Kespa. SC1 was "free" - Blizzard did not care if someone else earned money on SC1. So SC1 could become big. Now SC2 is coming, and Kespa will not have the interest in making SC2 big because they can not earn big money anymore. Kespa has forbidden all SC1 players to play SC2. The creator of SC2, Blizzard, takes all profit.

If Linus T took all profit then everyone would loose interest in Linux. There are lots of free hobby OSes out there. The thing is, Linux can make you rich, no one owns it. Tie your new OS or tech too hard to you, and no one will use it.

The problem is you wont get rich with Linux cause nobody wants it on their desktops.

Almost nobody pay for Desktop OS anyway (mostly pirated or bundled with new hardware), it is not a really good market to target. It is an "ok" support market if you live in a 2 million + city, but otherwise you will go bankrupt. The real market for Linux is enterprise, and most business know that fact really well.